opinionWar

American Grand Strategy or Grand Illusion?

Let’s face it: Whether you want to blame the current administration, unforeseen or misunderstood challenges, or a bumbling 400-member National Security Council, U.S. grand strategy has not been coherent since the Cold War.

Perhaps it was easier back then. The Soviet Union was our highly identifiable arch-nemesis, we created our respective spheres of influence, and the chess game commenced. But chess has rules, it has structure, and it rewards those who strategize within a set of parameters that are understood and accepted by both players.

In today’s highly unpredictable world, where the rules change without warning, where quasi-state actors shred the very tenets of the established international system, where revisionist nations can actually pose substantial threats to a regional power balance, where unipolarity gave way to a new multipolar system as the U.S. bumbled about in search of the right leadership strategy, and where nightmares about the Cold War awake the sleeping giants thought to be laid to rest, we find that chess or any game with set rules has become completely useless.

 

No Longer a Game by the Old Rules

Unfortunately, as David Rothkopf recently pointed out in a piece for Foreign Policy, Washington has no imagination anymore, and to expect any type of strategy to come out of such a convoluted atmosphere is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. But what Washington really needs is a reset. As has been well-documented by inner-circle types close to the Obama administration’s national security team, action has been trumped by endless contemplation; the George W. Bush era of shooting first but not asking any questions later is over, and the U.S. is now being hamstrung by this legacy.

If you do not fully understand the threat you are facing, you cannot build a strategy to deal with it, and blindly pouring resources into a relatively small threat leaves you hamstrung to deal with the larger ones you have always known.

There is a sweet spot between action and contemplation, and that sweet spot lies in the flattening out of America’s national security apparatus and the realignment of defense policy decision-making from the Oval Office to those who have made it their life’s work to understand the behavior of our inherently anarchic system. From this structure is where real strategy, in conjunction with the intelligence community, comes to fruition.

But make no mistake: While Washington’s think tanks spend vast amounts of research dollars trying to come up with what U.S. grand strategy should look like nowadays, it is no longer a valuable endeavor to do so. Instead, leaders should come to grips with the fact that until the world begins to resemble a more familiar power balance, educated gu